A Looks Inside
Getting inside the case is pretty easy, just remove the 2 thumbscrews on the side panel and slide it off. Once inside you can see Cooler Master has gone with an all black interior, which we feel is standard when it comes to cases these days.
Starting at the back of the case you have the power supply placement. There is a honeycomb opening on the bottom of the case that will let the power supply “breathe”. Moving up you have the PCI expansion slots. Cooler Master has gone with removable PCI slot covers that just use plain screws, no tool-less system here. Finally at the top is the 120mm exhaust fan, which does not have a fan grill on it.
Going towards the front of the case there is a small 2.5-inch hard drive cage. This cage is placed before the main hard drive cages. This makes me think that it will get in the way of larger, longer power supplies. We will have to see when I start installing components in the case. The small 2.5-inch hard drive cage can support up to 2 drives. Moving on to the other hard drive cages, there are 2 more of them. The top one holds four 3.5-inch drives, and the bottom one hold 2 more. The top hard drive cage can be removed for easy drive installation, plus it can be re-installed with the drives facing towards your motherboard, which is a nice feature.
At the toop of the case you have four 5.25-inch drive bays. These drive bays use the tool-less locking system that I fell in love with on the CM 690 II Advanced case.
There is a large opening in the motherboard tray to make installing an after-market CPU cooler easy since you won’t have to remove the motherboard to do so. There are also many cable routing holes that will allow you to route cables behind the motherboard for better airflow and just to keep the inside of your case clean.
